There are all of these little moments in my sketches that never make it into a final book, raw ideas that are loose and messy that capture the feelings or information I want to work into in a scene. Some are diagrams, some are page spreads, some belong in a future, unwritten project. But these simple ancestors are part of the evolution process, and the cutting room floor of HOW TO BE AN ELEPHANT is littered with a few of my favorite beginnings.

OPENING SEQUENCE

I struggled for months to find the right opening sequence for HOW TO BE AN ELEPHANT. I needed to set up high stakes for the newborn baby elephant, but I didn’t know what level of drama would feel right for the story. Should I include some lurking predators in the shadows, or start with the baby elephant’s birth (can I even do that in a picture book??). I tried every approach I could think of, from lions and hyenas to the herd gathered around a laboring mom-to-be:

The herd marching past an elephant skull and bones in the foreground.

The herd marching past hyenas feasting on a zebra.

The matriarch charging at lions.

The matriarch charging at hyenas. (I especially love this one and was sad to see it go.)

The herd gathering around a laboring mother.

The herd gathering around a laboring mother with a more dramatic camera angle.

The mother preparing to defend her newborn from an approaching lion.

If you’ve seen the final book, you might recognize some of these pieces—the posture of the charging elephant here, the composition of the elephants there. I pirated the parts I liked and adapted them to serve other beats of the story, deciding in the end that the birth of a baby was plenty of drama for the beginning.

The rough sketch for what would become the main opening image in the finished book.

GUT INSTINCTS

About halfway through the book, there’s a page spread called GUT INSTINCTS that explores how African elephants are “dietary generalists,” herbivores that can graze and browse on a wide variety of plants thanks to their specialized gut and their wide, diamond-shaped molars. Since elephants spend 12–18 hours a day eating, this spread needed to show a baby learning what to eat, so my first ideas featured teeth and menus, and a 200-pound baby sitting on a scale with a pile of food. I also needed to figure out how to draw a baby elephant tasting a pile of adult dung in an appropriate way:

A baby elephant reading from a menu weighed against one day’s worth of food.

A baby elephant checking out a pile of poop—eating adult elephant dung is actually very nutritious for a baby and supplies their gut with bacteria they need for digestion.

A view of the path that food takes through each member in the family herd.

The path food takes across an elephant’s teeth using the visual metaphor of a conveyor belt, along with the sketch of a mother and a baby elephant that worked well as a composition for the facing page.

In the end, it worked best to split up the information into two pages—the text and a diagram on the left and a full-page scene of the mother and baby eating on the right. This way, I could show the information about the tusks and molars without drawing the entire digestive system, but still include showing a baby’s means for learning what she’ll need to know about food as an adult.

The rough sketch for what would become the final art.

MAKING SPACE

So I have a confession to make: this spread is not one of my favorite beginnings. But it is one of my favorite ELEPHANT successes, because I literally finished every other painting of final art before finally solving the puzzle of pages 36 and 37. It may not look like a particularly complicated spread, but I needed it to serve as a bridge between the story of the family and the story of how African elephants impact an ecosystem. Was it supposed to be a diagram of the natural cycle of destruction and renewal? Or stay focused on this one particular herd? There were so many false starts and dead ends, but here’s a peek at my convoluted path:

A sketch of elephants tearing down a tree superimposed on a chart, which was meant to show the cycle of tree growth on the African savanna. An interesting attempt, but the information isn’t clear at all.

A sketch of the elephants walking through a landscape with a kind of call-out diagram of dung beetles next to a shovel. Elephants are called “mega-gardeners,” so I was was trying to play with the metaphor and see where it led. In this case, nowhere.

A sketch of elephants walking on two arrows meant to show growth and destruction, here again with the gardening/shovel idea. This direction implies that the impact of elephants is a predictable, circular cycle, which it is most definitely not.

Another attempt at a diagram combining the gardening/cycling ideas, but this time without the circular path. Also a bust.

The familiar family herd feasting on branches, bark, and roots on the left, with a hint of new forest growth on the right. Gasp—could it be? Perhaps this could work??

After many months of trying and failing, I finally took a cue from the layout of the “Tag! You’re It!” spread I created for NEIGHBORHOOD SHARKS; a single family stripping bark from a tree, composed in a way that also suggested the growth of new forests. It worked as a diagram but looked like a painting, so it effectively connected the story of the herd to the story of their greater role as gardeners in an ecosystem. At last! I solved the puzzle!!

The rough sketch for what would become the final art.

What a silly job this is, I often think. Look at all of these pieces that never get seen or used! But that’s nonsense, of course—they’re what make the finished book possible!—and they remind me that raw ideas can evolve into new and more sophisticated finished things.

About the Author

I'm the award-winning author and illustrator of NEIGHBORHOOD SHARKS and HOW TO BE AN ELEPHANT, and the illustrator for the EXPEDITIONERS series by S. S. Taylor. Sign up for my newsletter to join me in my studio every month for an exclusive, behind-the-scenes look at my latest sketches, research, events, classroom tools, giveaways and more!